Feed chutes are chutes or passages through which ammunition is guided into the breech mechanism of a machine gun or mini gun (which is a Gatling type gun having an unusually high rate of fire of 3000-6000 rounds per minute). It is often desirable to supply belted ammunition to machine guns via a feed chute in order to avoid jamming problems at the gun feeder mechanism that could potentially be caused by routing the ammunition belt through one or more sharp turns. An ammunition belt is a device used to retain and feed cartridges into a firearm, typically a machine gun or other automatic weapon. Belt-fed systems minimize the proportional weight of the ammunition to the feeding device along with allowing high rates of continuous fire from the machine gun for extended periods without reloading.
Belts were originally composed of canvas or cloth with pockets spaced evenly to allow the belt to be mechanically fed into the gun. These designs were prone to malfunctions due to the effects of oil and other contaminants altering the belt. Later belt designs used permanently connected metal links to retain the cartridges during feeding. These belts were more tolerant to exposure to solvents and oil but retained the limitation of being a fixed length or capacity. Many weapons designed to use non-disintegrating or canvas belts are provided with machines to automatically reload these belts with loose rounds or rounds held in stripper clips. In use during World War I, reloaders allowed ammunition belts to be recycled quickly to allow practically continuous fire.
Most modern ammunition belts use disintegrating links. Disintegrating links retain a single round and are articulated and connected with the round ahead of it in the belt. When the round ahead is stripped from the belt and fed into the feed system or chamber, the link holding it is ejected, and the link holding the following round is disarticulated. An advantage of this design is the ability to create belts of any length. Some weapons, such as the M134 mini gun and related designs, use a hybrid mechanism to strip rounds from disintegrating belts into a linkless feed system or a specialized delinker to allow for more reliable feeding at extreme rates of fire.
Conventional versions of feed chutes are made entirely from metal. They cannot be easily taken apart without tools in the event a component fails or an ammunition jam occurs. Because they are entirely composed of metal, they are vulnerable to crushing, which then prevents ammunition from flowing freely through the chute. They also have gaps between segments, resulting in small gaps between sheet-metal portions that enable ammunition to jam at those locations. Improperly linked ammunition can also cause jams if the round repositioner has not corrected alignment issues between the cartridge cases and links. This can occur when the link and cartridge have been mislinked with either the link tab positioned below the rim of the cartridge or on the side of the cartridge, thus causing a change in the alignment from the correct position with the link tab in the extractor groove of the case. An example of a known flexible feed chute is U.S. Pat. No. 2,477,264 to Pearson.
It is therefore an object of this invention to provide a flexible and durable ammunition feed chute that operates reliably and which can be taken apart and serviced without tools.